Showing posts with label Satie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Satie. Show all posts

Saturday, 19 March 2016

It's All About Piano Festival - film about Alexandre Tharaud and recital by Joanna MacGregor, 18 March 2016

Images: Mariona Vilaros

Ciné Lumière, Institut Français

Ligeti – Musica ricercata, nos 1-6
Satie – Gnossiennes nos 1, 3, 5
Satie – Sports et divertissements
Liszt – Nuages gris, S 199
Liszt – La gondola lugubre, S 200/1
Wagner-Liszt – Isoldens Liebestod - Schlußszene aus Richard Wagners ‘Tristan und Isolde’, S 447
Piazzolla, arr. MacGregor – Four Tangos

 

The Institut Français ‘It’s All About Piano!’ festival has now become an established part of the London musical calendar. Any excuse to visit the institute is always welcome for me: one of the few places I know in London where I can drink decent wine at a reasonable price; I also get to practise a little of my French too. This weekend, though, is by any standards quite an undertaking; I wish my schedule had permitted me to attend more. As it was, I saw the opening film and opening concert, both of which gave me pleasure and food for thought.
 

First, I saw Raphaëlle Aellig Régnier’s 2013 film, Le Temps dérobé (translated, or perhaps better, very freely rendered, into English as Behind the Veil). The pianist Alexandre Tharaud talks about his travelling life and his concert routine, and we observe him on tour. There are a few snatches of music from Bach to Stravinsky but the performances are not in themselves the thing; there is no complete performance (although there is, apparently, on the DVD version: Mozart’s KV 488). We hear so much in general about the travails of a performing artist’s travelling life that we almost become inured to them; not here, for the pain as well as the pleasure readily comes through. Tharaud speaks frankly about the loneliness of touring, which might be fine for a twenty-year-old, but becomes more testing as an artists ages. (Not, of course, that he is old!) He speaks about his dislike of his body, his arms in particular, which perhaps surprises the viewer, since the pianist is certainly loved by the camera; Tharaud, however, tells us that he has learned to live with that and indeed to harness it. Collaborations with artists such as Jean-Guihen Queyras, Bernard Labadie, and the composer, Gérard Pesson are witnessed, as well as that ultimate musical-heroic achievement, the solo piano recital. (Yes, I know many will disagree, but you will not convince me otherwise.) The interest and delight Tharaud takes in the wizardry of his piano tuner is especially winning – and informative. Régnier’s film-making captures the pianist both as an object, willing or otherwise, and as an initiator.


The first recital of the weekend was given by Joanna MacGregor. She had been asked to include Satie, it being the composer’s 150th anniversary and clearly relished the opportunity to do so. If MacGregor is in her element with Satie, I admit that I am much less so. My problem with music that is primarily conceptual, indeed shouts itself to be so, even if that shout be a nonchalant one, remains. The Gnossiennes, three of them, sounded genuinely charming, mystical even, imbued with intriguing, even incongruous, hints of Eastern Europe. Sports et divertissements: well, the madcap, cinematic sketches were diverting, but I should not have wished to hear any more. MacGregor’s performance, as well as her engaging spoken introduction, could not be faulted. Perhaps the fault, such as it is, lies with me. I simply do not listen in the way Satie seems to want; or maybe the problem is that he does not want anything at all. Answers on a Parisian postcard, please.

 


 
We had heard, preceding the Satie pieces, the first six of Ligeti’s near-miraculous ‘opus one’, his Musica ricercata. How wonderfully inventive they are, even if they sound much more ‘like’ their influences than the ‘mature’ composer. This is process music to which I can relate, and indeed to which anyone, I think, can relate, intellectually and emotionally. MacGregor’s command of the keyboard, of Ligeti’s range of styles, of the humour of these pieces had me longing for more. I hope I shall have the opportunity to hear her play the whole set.
 

I was not entirely sure quite what the Liszt works were doing in the programme, not that I minded. Nuages gris sounded beautiful, all the more so for its lightly-worn depression. Liszt’s imagination in these late works: what can one say that has not been said before? They remain as extraordinary in their crafting, their bitterness, their radicalism as they ever were. So Nuages gris, which threatens to go beyond Debussy and Bartók avant la lettre, sounded here. The first Lugubre gondola was taken lighter, more swiftly than I can recall. It made me think I had perhaps made too much of a meal out of it myself. It is certainly not how I should always want to hear it, but the voice from the water spoke as alluringly as, if less Romantically than, I can recall. Liszt’s transcription of the so-called Liebestod – Liszt’s doing, I am afraid, that troublesome title for Isoldes Verklärung – from Tristan und Isolde was somewhat let down by some surprising technical slips. It was, though, perhaps the most radical of MacGregor’s performances: Wagner heard more as Satie than as Liszt, or so it sounded to me. Again, I should not always wish to hear it like this; in context, however, and without didactic fanfare, it intrigued.
 

MacGregor sounded much more at home, immediately, in her own transcriptions of Piazzolla Tangos. I am afraid I do not know which they were, since they were not listed in the programme, and I am anything but an expert in this repertoire. What I can say is that colour, harmony, and rhythm moved, now slinky, now more sexually aggressive, in her interpretations as if they were one. Indeed, the performances did not really sound like ‘interpretations’ at all, so faithful and yet so free did they sound. MacGregor added another as an encore, lapped up by an appreciative audience.



 
 

Sunday, 10 February 2013

London Sinfonietta/Hannigan - Satie and Stravinsky, 10 February 2013


Queen Elizabeth Hall

Satie – Socrate
Stravinsky – Three Pieces for string quartet
Three Pieces for clarinet
Concertino
Renard

Barbara Hannigan (soprano/director)
Daniel Norman (tenor)
Edgaras Montvidas (tenor)
Roderick Williams (bass)
John Molloy (bass)
Reinbert de Leeuw (piano)
Timothy Lines (clarinet)
Harriet Walter (narrator)
Timberlake Wertenbaker (script writer)
London Sinfonietta

 
This concert was part of a greater weekend of concerts at the Southbank Centre looking at Paris during the second and third decades of the twentieth century, the weekend itself part of the year-long Rest is Noise season. An arresting opening – which I initially feared would irritate, but which actually worked very well – was provided by Harriet Walter’s narration, replete with East Coast accent, presenting a first-person sketch, written by Timberlake Wertenbaker, of the life of Winnaretta Singer. Daughter of the inventor of the sewing machine, Isaac Singer, Winnaretta went on to become the celebrated musical patroness, Princess Edmund de Polignac, commissioning both Socrate and Renard, though Diaghilev’s machinations and Stravinsky’s duplicity – at least according to this account – meant that her salon would not host the latter work’s premiere. Walter’s delivery of the script was just as excellent as one would expect from this fine actress: never overdone, effortlessly convincing.  I wondered a little about the Princess’s, or rather Wertenbaker’s, claim that patrons go unsung. Not in my lectures they do not; indeed, I sometimes wonder whether I over-emphasise their role. I also wondered whether a male patron would have received quite so sympathetic a treatment: might we not at least have been led to think, ‘why should someone inherit all that money in the first place?’ But those are quibbles, and the narration, heard before Socrate and before Renard seemed to go down well with the audience.

 
Satie’s Socrate: oh dear. I tried; I really did. Doubtless some will say that was the problem. But for me, its sole redeeming feature was the excellence of the performances from Barbara Hannigan and Reinbert de Leeuw. Cool, white, monotonous, with the occasional subtle colouring of the vocal line: soprano and pianist were really beyond reproach. However, a work, like so much of Satie, which seems set up to forestall criticism – whatever you say against it, someone will respone, ‘well that is the point’ – had better be of Stravinskian quality if, as, for instance The Rake’s Progress does, it attempts that disabling tactic. Frankly, it makes one long even for the dullest of Stravinsky: Apollo, or Orpheus, say. Its lengthy ‘setting’ of Plato – is it really a ‘setting’ at all, when it seems to respond no more to the text than Rossini does in much of his Stabat Mater? – drones on and on, until, by the time the third part, ‘La Mort de Socrate’ opens, one feels as if one has been suffering the same composer’s Vexations. What a strange conception of ancient Greece this is; it almost makes one sympathise with Nietzsche’s venom against Socrates. The artists, admirably controlled throughout, made the most of the slight suggestion of drama as we heard of the poison’s arrival, but if the best one can say about something is that it is somewhat less tedious than the music of Philip Glass, perhaps it is time to wonder whether Satie has an Emperor, let alone clothes.

 
Stravinsky’s invention thus struck the hall like a thunderbolt. It always does, at least in good performances, and these performances were certainly that. A string quartet (Jonathan Morton, Joan Atherton, Paul Silverthorne, Tim Gill, all standing save for the cellist) drawn from the London Sinfonietta brought us the composer’s astonishing Three Pieces. The work’s strangeness, its utter dissociation from anything one might consider to constitute a string quartet repertoire and tradition still shocks – and certainly did so here. Defiantly post-Rite of Spring, this is in many senses a far more radical break with ‘tradition’, as unique as Le Roi des étoiles. Tightly focused rhythms and – as soon as one bothered to listen – a profusion of melody were hallmarks of this account. The final piece brought a sense of the hieratic, but what a contrast it made with the mere tedium of Satie. Here was music. Timothy Lines offered strong performances of the Three Pieces for clarinet, written five years later in 1919. If the first offered a gentler, one is almost tempted to say pastoral, sound-world, it remained utterly Stravinskian in its evident ‘construction’. And in any case, there was nothing remotely gentle about its joyous successor, nor to the third, which seemed to anticipate the world of Renard. The performance was rich in tonal and dynamic differentiation, rhythm propelling the notes and their ‘meaning’. The 1920 Concertino for string quartet followed, though oddly the programme had no notes on it. Again, the utterly individual approach of the composer not only to the medium of the string quartet but to stringed instruments themselves was immediately announced. A kaleidoscope of what Stravinsky would have hated one to call ‘moods’ – unless, of course, he arbitrarily decided to use the word, as in his Norwegian Moods – revealed itself during the work’s brief span. Here was concision to rival Webern, yet long before Stravinsky’s serialist turn. It sounded almost akin to a mechanised Beethoven Bagatelle.

 
Hannigan turned director for the wonderful burlesque, Renard, given in concert performance, Colour and rhythm were very much to the fore in a performance for which she seemed to act more as enabler than dictator. Old Stravinsky hands that the London Sinfonietta are, that is doubtless the right way around. Thematic consistency during and after the opening March was especially noteworthy; this was no mere collection of episodes. Even when the Cock turned languid, ‘Sizhu na dubu...’ (‘I’m on my perch...’), rhythmic underpinning remained tight. There was room for seduction too, from the Fox with his cake. But above all what struck was the visceral nature of Stravinsky’s score, so truthful a representation of the or at least a childhood imagination. The London Sinfonietta’s performance could not be faulted; the four vocal soloists proved fine advocates too. If the tenors perhaps captured greater attention, that is probably more a reflection of score than performance. Why do we not hear this work more often?